The Pillar of the House
The community manager had been effortlessly funneling points and resources my way, so even after accounting only for points, I sat on six hundred million of them. To put that in perspective, it was enough to buy around eleven Mythic-grade traits at the next shop tier.
On top of that, I held assets worth another six hundred million points in raw resources. Even factoring in the accelerating inflation that kept driving prices higher with every round, the sheer volume of materials I’d stockpiled was staggering.
This was the true majesty of the Meteor Cartel. Sesaisa, Mihun, and Wahando each had to redistribute a portion of their points to their lower subordinates to keep their worlds running. In contrast, no other player could touch my world—nor were they allowed to—so every last point was mine to spend freely.
The first thing I did was burn a colossal amount of points to buy up every scrap of knowledge flooding the market.
Even at this stage, there were still plenty of people selling knowledge. In fact, quite a few.
Sell it early and one piece might fetch only a few thousand points. But release it after several rounds had passed, and the same information could command tens of millions. The game’s brutal inflation made that inevitable. (Of course, buying or selling early came with the advantage of snowballing your progress much faster.)
Naturally, I prioritized every branch of biological knowledge first—ecology, biology, molecular biology, magical biology, and so on. After that, I spared no expense on anything that could benefit an ecosystem: climate science, geology, and related fields.
Was this the lingering resentment of someone who never properly attended university? It felt like I was buying random junk just because I had points to burn.
To properly organize everything I’d acquired, I dispatched one of my clones to act as a dedicated study subject. I manipulated its subjective time so it could spend several decades doing nothing but studying. Thankfully, I genuinely enjoy learning. The joy of discovery is real. With a god’s mind, there’s no fatigue or physical limit—only the pure pleasure of absorbing knowledge.
I didn’t even leave any assets in reserve for buying Mythic traits. Looking at how things were going, the points I gained each game would be more than enough to cover them anyway.
Because I was redistributing points to other players in exchange for vast amounts of knowledge, some began offering non-aggression pacts in return, or even extracting specialized knowledge from their subordinate gods to sell exclusively to me.
The truly secret and critical information was probably off-limits, but if it was for sale and I didn’t already know it, I bought it.
I also purchased knowledge about bizarre life forms from completely alien ecosystems. There might be biological strategies I’d never even imagined.
I bought an equal mountain of mystical knowledge. Since I was practically an outsider to that field, I simply swept up everything available. That included the [Introduction to Aeao’s Poungar Gurun] I’d discovered early on.
It turned out to be far more useful than I expected. In fact, within mystical academia it was considered a major text. When I asked for an introductory manual at this stage, the seller was more surprised than I was.
I still didn’t fully understand the principle, but I interpreted it as “a technique that allows physical force to strike at mystical entities.” I handed it over to Chaltteoggua, and he’s been using it quite effectively.
Beyond that, I bought everything related to constructing or redesigning spiritual realms, along with detailed ecological data on spirit-flow systems and the creatures that inhabit them. If I didn’t buy it now, I’d end up paying two or even a hundred times more later. Better to get it while the getting was good.
Worried the community might notice exactly what kind of knowledge I was hoarding, I also picked up texts on politics, law, economics, military science, theology, and similar subjects to muddy the waters.
Military science in particular proved surprisingly helpful for predicting enemy tactics, so I bought more aggressively in that area.
In the end, I fully recycled the six hundred million points I’d received from others. I processed raw materials—acquired far below market value—through biological methods, sold them to Wahando for points, and used those points to buy even more knowledge.
The knowledge I accumulated could later be sold to the other Meteors. In a sense, I had become a kind of library.
As for mana stones and other resources related to magic power and flow, I fed every last one into the Nectar Well and scattered them across my world. At its root, my world suffered from a severe lack of magic power, so reinforcement was necessary no matter the method.
The next collision would be the eleventh. Since it was an expansion phase, expanding into the Great Firmament then would solve everything cleanly. For now, however, I had limits.
And so, after devouring an opponent world worth forty million points, my territory had grown from two hundred thousand square kilometers to three hundred and twenty thousand.
Anyone who saw my current score would be shocked.
28,432,169 points.
Yeah. Fuck. It dropped. My opponent had crowdfunded forty million points, and before the collision I’d been sitting above thirty million—yet my score had still fallen.
The drop in Life was understandable. A single collision always blew a huge chunk of that stat away. The decline in Military was also to be expected.
Those would recover slowly. If my ecosystem had simply been recovering at a normal pace, I would have seen the gradual upward trend and thought nothing of it.
But that wasn’t what was happening. My score was still falling. While Life was rising, Mystery and Faith were plummeting at an alarming rate.
The reason was so obvious I had nothing to say. I watched Sesaisa and Mihun as they personally tuned my world and bit my lip.
“This is quite troublesome. In my opinion, we won’t be able to do anything about it until right before the disaster phase.”
“The heavenly and earthly energies have dried up so severely that restoring them will require at least twice the flow we’ve already invested. Of course, if we simply choose not to restore them, the situation changes.”
That son of a bitch Dindinaron.
Dindinaron had been pushed back the entire fight, then, in a final bid to defeat me, sucked up every resource, every fragment of divine power, and every flow and material in his world to create two colossal monsters—one for defense, one for offense.
The defensive one was the immediate problem. It had fused with the holy land and was still stuck there like thick, grotesque sludge. We had received the occupation verdict, but the creature continued draining flow. If left alone, it would undergo abnormal proliferation. He must have decided that was the minimum required to hold out against me.
The offensive monster was also a headache. Chaltteoggua had beaten it to death, right? But the damn thing had been designed to release an overwhelming toxic or cursed aura upon death, devastating my ecosystem.
It seemed he’d arranged things so that if the offensive creation died, I wouldn’t be able to immediately destroy the defensive one. Since I had nearly destroyed both at the same time, his scheme hadn’t mattered much… but the contamination it caused was still severe.
Removing the opponent’s filth—poison, death energy, and the rest—required an astronomical amount of divine power. Even with Shuc-rimmurath empowered by the hermit crabs, the cleanup took forever.
Then came the enormous resources needed to restore the devoured divine fragments. If I didn’t restore them, both my ecosystem and the half of the god fragment I’d consumed would essentially be thrown away. I had no choice but to pour everything in.
“If opponents start using this strategy from now on, I don’t know what we’ll do.”
Normally, no player would attempt this strategy, nor would they need to counter it. The game offered far too many ways to defeat or weaken powerful entities. That was why relying on giant monsters wasn’t considered an especially excellent strategy.
And even if you made such monsters, what then? It was impossible for a single monster to destroy every civilization in an opposing world. Even Yeondan-u couldn’t do that against a world of similar scale. Opponents weren’t idiots.
If they simply held out, the giant monsters would eventually self-destruct from resource starvation. After that, no matter how stably they’d been created, the opponent’s world would be left with almost no resources. The logical outcome was defeat in the next collision. Under normal circumstances, any rational player would choose stable defense and eventual surrender rather than such desperate flailing.
The problem was, none of that worked against me.
First, because I had no civilization, if the Dessert Legion commanders were all slain and I seized the Nectar Well, the occupation verdict would trigger with very high probability.
Second, resource exhaustion meant nothing to me. My entire strategy revolved around draining the opponent’s resources dry. If they were driven to such extremes, it already meant they were cornered.
Third, losing to me meant the end. When defeat equals total annihilation, the mindset of “if I’m going to die anyway, I might as well…” was only natural. The very premise of surrendering to fight another day was impossible.
“It doesn’t seem like an idea an opponent would easily come up with. Winning would still leave them with greater losses.”
“But if losing means losing everything, then at least half of the remaining twenty players will probably try it. And not all of them or their subordinate gods are fools.”
“That is true.”
I needed some kind of safety mechanism. Something that would make an opposing player feel, “Even if I kill all the Dessert Legion commanders, I still can’t occupy their world.”
“With all the knowledge you’ve purchased, the abundant resources at your disposal, the species with potential to evolve into intelligent beings, and the factions within the Dessert Legion, are you finally going to construct a new civilization?”
“Ah. Nope.”
“I thought as much…”
One thing was certain: relying solely on the Nectar Well wouldn’t work. To be precise, at this point I had two major strongholds—the Creamland and the Nectar Well.
“That is correct. Creamland can now be considered an independent space from the Nectar Well. Since it absorbs every flow across the entire region and converts it into cream, it functions as a separate nutrient-producing stronghold.”
Creamland existed in two distinct realms: sky and earth.
Shuc-rimmurath bound the earthly territories into Creamland, while Wafflach-Nacha wove the heavenly spiritual realms into it as well.
Strictly speaking, however, Creamland didn’t exist in the sky or on the earth. It was centered on the flows entangled with the god fragments… in reality, it was some complicated magic that overlapped with reality as an alternate space.
“In the end, if I don’t understand it, it’s just magic…”
Yeah, that’s right… If I can’t understand it, it’s magic…
But two strongholds were still incomplete. I needed at least three. If an enemy monster was capable of smashing my entire world, Creamland would inevitably be destroyed too. And if the Nectar Well were taken, Creamland would collapse automatically.
“Hmm…”
In other words, my ecosystem was abnormally dependent on the Nectar Well. It had always been that way. There simply wasn’t a more efficient energy source than nectar.
But my ecosystem had grown far too vast. Whether I expanded the Nectar Well into a lake or an ocean, it could never sustain the entire ecosystem alone.
The same went for Creamland. In the end, its role was to distribute and process the Nectar Well’s enormous energy outward… If the Nectar Well fell, everything ended.
I needed another method. The next phase was the disaster section anyway, and even after that, there would still be some time before the eleventh collision.
While my territory wasn’t expanding any further, I had to improve the health of my ecosystem as much as possible. Beyond that, I needed to face the next collision with a stable, reliable weight class.
But I couldn’t do it myself. If I gave points to Sesaisa or Mihun, how many contribution points would I get? I couldn’t afford to scatter them so carelessly.
I would still ask Sesaisa for help, but I’d only assign him the task of organizing knowledge. This particular mission needed to go to someone else.
“To whom?”
To the pathetic parasite in our Dessert Legion that does nothing but eat all day.
“Yogur-tosoth.”
【Creator. What is the matter?】
“I am assigning a new mission to the First Legion Commander I trust most in my army. Your task is to establish a new ecological stronghold—one separate from the Nectar Well.”
Yogur-tosoth’s countless eyes instantly shook with a pupil earthquake. No matter how he looked at it, the task seemed insanely difficult.
That was exactly why I had to encourage him.
“If you complete this mission successfully, I shall grant you full ownership of that stronghold. Make it entirely your domain. Failure is acceptable, and you may use unlimited resources.”
【Ooh! I shall definitely accomplish it!】
What a simple creature. I could only hope that this incompetent fool would finally earn his keep this time.